Category Archives: Economics

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

CO2 Mitigation

6 Comments

Thoughts on the cost ineffectiveness:

As we say on the shopping channels, “But wait. There’s more.” How much would it cost, I wondered, to forestall 1 Celsius degree of warming, if all measures to make “global warming” go away were as hilariously cost-ineffective as the Sandwell Sparrow-Slicer?

We economists call this the “mitigation cost-effectiveness.” You get the mitigation cost-effectiveness by dividing the total warming forestalled by the total lifetime cost of the project. And the answer? Well, it’s a very affordable $13 quadrillion per Celsius degree of warming forestalled.

And remember, this is an underestimate, because our methodology will have tended to overstate the warming forestalled — and that’s before we politicians ask any questions about whether IPeCaC’s estimates of climate sensitivity are wanton, flagrant exaggerations. (Cries of “No!” “Shame!” “Resign!” “What did I do with my expenses claim form?”)

Suppose it was just as cost-ineffective to make “global warming” from other causes go away as it is to make “global warming” from CO2 go away. In that event, assuming — as the World Bank does — that global annual GDP is $60 trillion, what percentage of this century’s global output of all that we make and do and sell would be gobbled up in climate mitigation? The answer is an entirely reasonable 736%, or, to put it another way, 736 years’ global GDP.

But won’t someone think of the children?

Business, Economics, History, Political Commentary, Space, Space History

Sputnik, And Apollo

10 Comments

Over at NRO, Jonah Goldberg points out the ridiculousness of the administration’s attempts to leverage the bin Laden killing to promote its domestic agenda, but in doing so, he misses a crucial point about the president’s historical confusion in the State of the Union:

Which brings us back to salmon regulations, immigration, high-speed rail, renewable energy, and other action items on Obama’s “win the future” agenda laid out in January’s address. Back then, Obama said we were in a “Sputnik moment,” referring to the time when the Soviet Union’s launch of a satellite inspired the Apollo space program and increased spending on scientific education and research.

…the most bestest part, as Brennan might say, is the simple fact that the president doesn’t know how we’ll “win the future.” In his Oval Office address on the Gulf oil spill, Obama explained that we don’t know how we’ll get where we need to go or what the destination will even look like.

But that’s the genius of the Sputnik analogy. Since, as Obama explained, “we had no idea how we would beat (the Soviets) to the moon,” it’s okay that we don’t know how to “win the future.” And that in turn means that during the weakest recovery in half a century, we can blow billions on mythical green-energy jobs, push a government takeover of health care, encourage skyrocketing gas prices, impose crippling regulations and higher taxes, and make “investments” in white elephants and high-speed salmon.

To clarify, Sputnik did not in fact give us Apollo, though it did kick off the space race, so to conflate Sputnik with not knowing how we would beat the Soviets to the moon is historically ignorant. Apollo occurred not as a direct result of Sputnik, but as a result of Yuri Gagarin beating us at getting a man into space (on April 12th, 1961, three and a half years after Sputnik), the embarrassment of the Bay of Pigs fiasco a few days later, resulting in a need to show that we were still in the game internationally, and our (final) success in getting a man into space ourselves (though not orbit) on May 5th, boosting our confidence. Twenty days after that (the fiftieth anniversary is coming up in a few days), Kennedy announced the goal of sending a man to the moon and back by the end of the decade. So even if you buy the president’s absurd logic in attempting to contextualize Apollo, it would have made much more sense to talk about our “Gagarin moment,” not our “Sputnik moment.”

And of course, as I’ve written before, anyone who uses the hackneyed phrase “If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we…” almost always makes an inappropriate analogy in the process.